It is, of course, well known that buildings must be insulated in order to retain heat or cold when the temperatures outside are very different from the desired temperature within the building. This is particularly a problem in metal buildings of a commercial type, since metal is a very good conductor of heat.
In order to install insulation in the ceiling of a metal building, it has become a common practice to insulate during the initial construction of the building and to provide the insulation in the top of the building before the final layer of the roof is put onto the building, for example, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,346,543 to Wilson et al. One of the problems with this approach is that the installation of the insulation interferes with the construction of the building. Usually, different people do the insulation work, and since the speed of installing the building is typically very important, the insulation steps detract from the timeliness of construction. Consequently, there is a need to be able to insulate a building more quickly.
Another category of insulation problems relates to insulating a building which is already existing, or adding insulation to such existing building in order to increase the R-factor of the ceiling or walls. Especially since each existing building is somewhat different, there is no one approach that seems to be universally acceptable.
Another major problem with metal buildings is that there is a great deal of expansion and contraction that occurs, especially from the extreme heat in summer to the extreme cold in winter. Prior art joints for insulation purposes tend to expand and thereby get damaged in the summer and contract and therefore open up in the winter to allow cold air to pass directly therethrough. Since the prior art structures do not completely solve this problem, there is a need for a method and apparatus for installing insulation which will adequately address the problem.